Archive for March, 2009

Skittles: Sustaining Innovation

Published March 15, 2009 Operations , Strategy 2 Comments
Tags: ,

In March of 2008, ad agency modernista went siteless, allowing the Web to speak for the company. A review by Allison Mooney on PSFK.com said it well:

What better way to show clients you “get” Web 2.0 than disappearing into it?

A year later, Skittles takes the same approach. The darling of social media – Twitter – is the focus of the siteless brand. David Armano’s review of the effort is noted here. I’m not interested in replicating any reviews completed thus far (let’s be real, Armano’s review is great). What interests me is the sustainability of the effort. I’ve used reports from two analytic resources: compete.com and twist. Here are the results:

The total time spent on a domain as a percentage of the total time spent online by all U.S. Internet users.

Velocity reports the relative change in daily Attention. Velocity is used to determine the relative growth of a domain over a particular timeframe or compared to other sites.

Twitter Analysis

This report, courtesy of Twist (http://twist.flaptor.com/), indicated the jump in traffic on twitter.

The results: Skittles succeeded in causing a buzz in twitter and Web traffic, but this appears to be short lived. Innovation is a powerful tool, but without sustainability and a change in behavior, the energy (and money) invested does not provide the greatest returns.

Pro Twitter Tip: Avoid TMI

Published March 2, 2009 twitter Leave a Comment

Even if the phrase escapes some members of the older generation, there’s no mistaking what IT is: Too Much Information. Wikipedia sums it up quite well:

Too much information, an expression indicating that someone has divulged too much personal information and made the listener uncomfortable.

Without adding too many colorful stories to this post (I’ve overheard too much while out and about, oddly enough, in Chipotle), you never want to be that person that shares way too much. With the rise of social media, users are faced with a glut of information. There are times where this level of noise becomes just too much.

Take a look at the following tweet (the name of the offender has been  blurred out to avoid further humiliation):

TMILet’s setup a few simple rules for social media:

  1. Yes, we live in an age of transparency, but please keep certain things under wraps.
  2. Adding a TMI Alert to a public comment is like telling people in line the plot of a movie… in a loud voice. Avoid it.
  3. Unless you want something rebroadcast, don’t post it on-line.

Follow those simple rules and you can keep your social media use free of embarrassing problems.

Subscribe

 Subscribe in a reader

Subscribe to Fluent Simplicity by Email

a

Connect with me on:

Twitter